Thanks. Was she the only Chimp left at BD or was there some other reason for this move if she's not pure?
BD still have 1:3 pure Western Chimps, I believe the reason for her leaving was because she didn't get on with some of the members of the BD group and had been living separate from the group for a while.
To breed eventually, I suppose, although currently there are no facilities in order to do so. Hopefully this will be rectified quite quickly, otherwise I can think of more logical moves that could be made with this potentially viable young female. I don’t mean to be sceptical, but they have been talking for many years now about adding breeding facilities. And I was also told on this forum that this has been blocked previously, outside of the zoo’s control. Hopefully this will be changing now.
The zoo has announced new opening times. They will now open at 10am year round, as opposed to previously opening from 9am year round. Also, childrens entry price has been reduced to £9.95 or £9 without the donation.
Interesting. I always thought it was a bit unusual to open so early, and probably of little benefit. Lucky! I need to go back soon!
On a Europe-wide level, actually Edinburgh (along with Bristol) was always the UK collection which followed the general trend the closest it's actually pretty damn unusual on the continent for collections to remain closed until 10am as almost all major UK collections do..... and they tend to remain open later than ours do, too! Of course, given how much this particular collection has declined in recent years - and the fact that pretty much all the species which most benefited from longer opening hours permitting multiple revisits are gone - the extra hour probably didn't make much difference anymore when Edinburgh held treasures like Northern Luzon Cloud Rat, Marbled Polecat, Tibetan Golden Cat, Maned Wolf, European Souslik and so forth, it was very useful!
I guess they’ll also have taken into account things like revenue from shop and restaurant sales between 9am and 10am when making this decision, versus the cost of paying their staff team for this additional hour.